Slow down your ear
and it becomes clearer:
somewhere out there
the wilds of the savanna –

the whooping of hyena.
Slow it further still:
someone searching whistling,
the call of a humpback whale.

And now, the single voice
within its green chancel
is joined by another
and plays antiphonal.

Tracks in parallel:
chirping on the line
like a spike in signal.
No sign of the train. Jack Thacker

Robert Peake is an American-born poet living near London. He created the Transatlantic Poetry series, bringing poets together for live online readings and conversations. His film-poems have been widely screened in the US and Europe. His collection The Knowledge is available from Nine Arches Press.

Jack Thacker’s poetry has been published in PN Review, The Clearing and The Literateur, has been commissioned by the Bristol and Bath Festival of Nature and has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Natural Histories. He is the winner of the 2016 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition, judged by Andrew Motion, and is currently the poet-in-residence at the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading.

Anna Dillon is a landscape artist living in Oxfordshire. Her paintings have been used as illustrations for the book Middle Ridgeway, written by Eric Jones and her father Patrick Dillon. Middle Ridgeway describes the chalk landscape of the Ridgeway from prehistory to the present day.